Cellular communication systems have become commonplace and are used by a large majority of people for person-to-person communication. Moreover, with the increasing use of smartphones, digitally distributed content is more and more consumed on wireless devices. While the delivery of a large part of such content, e.g. web content, needs to be directly controllable by the user, the delivery of media content, such as video, can in many cases be shared by several users.
In order to increase efficiency of shared media consumption, point-to-multipoint systems such as broadcasting and/or multicasting can be used. In this way, network resources are shared between receiving wireless devices to a higher degree. A set of related standards for point-to-multipoint content delivery using cellular communication systems is 3GPP MBMS (3rd Generation Partnership Project-Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service) and 3GPP eMBMS (evolved MBMS).
In streaming content, as for traditional content delivery such as conventional television, it is sometimes desired to disrupt the main content to insert secondary content. The secondary content can e.g. be advertisements or other messages.
US2011022471 presents messaging services for providing updates for multimedia content delivered over the Internet for a live event. In one embodiment, a messaging server provides real-time updates for multimedia content of a live event delivered over the Internet to multiple media players that request the multimedia content over the Internet. In one embodiment, the real-time updates indicate when the multimedia content is available for delivery over the Internet. In another embodiment, the real-time updates can be used to dynamically insert advertisement markers for advertisement breaks in the multimedia content. The presented solution describes two models of including advertisements. In the first model, advertising is inserted into the video stream of the live event at some point before the video stream reaches the encoder services. Such a solution is inflexible and rigid, and does not allow advertisements to be selected freely. In the second model, each individual media player inserts one or more advertisements into the multimedia content fr live events. However, it can be troublesome for the client device to switch from a main content to secondary content and then back to the main content, since each such redirection involves rebuffering, which can e.g. result in a temporary black screen for the end user.